[RPG Theory] Apophenia, RPGs & Creativity

[stevekenson]

“Apophenia, noun: the tendency to see connections where none exist.”
— The Question, Justice League Unlimited, “Double Date”

One thing you hear often about roleplaying games is they are exercise for the imagination, they force players (including GMs) to flex their creative muscles to come up with all the imaginary stuff that goes into a typical roleplaying game session, to say nothing of a sustained campaign.

One of the elements of RPGs falling out of vogue as “uncreative” is creation of anything by one or more random die rolls: players demand more precision, more creative control, it is said. Systems of point-accounting or allocation are preferred to “roll 3d6 six times” or the like. What this new desire to take the randomness out of character, setting, and adventure design in RPGs does not seem to take into account is how inspiring that randomness can be. How the imagination fires when confronted with a seemingly unconnected list of things and told “make these pieces fit together.”

Take Marvel Super-Heroes for example. It’s character creation system is almost vestigial, since you’re expected to play Spider-Man, or Wolverine, or to fight over who gets to (or has to) play Spider-Man and Wolverine... At any rate, creating original characters is entirely by random die rolls, givng you a collection of abilities, talents, and powers. My game group still jokes about the “wings, claws, ice generation” combo that came up in one of our early games. Funny thing is, that system of randomly rolling-up characters provided some interesting sparks. Take the player who rolled up a super-strong, kind of clumsy hero with Quills who decided his hero was a humanoid cactus... the Mighty Saquarro! Would this player have ever just thought up such a character cold and decided “hey, that sounds like fun”?

What about the Traveller world-creation system that sometimes provided seemingly contradictory conditions? Some might say the system is broken, but what about the cases where the universe surprises us with seeming contraditions? What about the creative challenge of figuring out why that world with no atmosphere has such a high population? Could some sort of natural disaster have driven everyone into underground cities? Was cloning technology, intended to keep the colony alive during the Long Night, misused to create an underground world of overpopulated, disposable mine workers who have never seen the sky?

See what I mean?

Even that humble 3d6 roll. Imagine creating a D&D character as a blank slate, then choosing a class based on the character’s strengths and weaknesses (just as we tend to choose careers and vocations in real life). Rather than figuring out a class from the start and an “optimal build” for it, explain why your wizard is both strong (Str 14) and clumsy (Dex 8) in addition to his notable intellect (Int 17). Was he an oafish farm-lad far smarter than anyone gave him credit (because of his clumsiness) until the local wizard noticed him? Or was he on his way to becoming a soldier before a terrible injury almost crippled him, leaving him to study and discover a talent for the arcane? Or is he a wizard at all? Perhaps he’s a half-decent warrior, who’s slow in body, but a cunning tactician.

Sometimes RPGs forget that part of the fun of the game is not just putting together all those disparate parts, but filling in and providing the creative “glue” that holds them together and breathes life into them. There’s a lot empahsis on the mechanics of character building, rather than letting the random number generators (the dice) do a lot of the generating, and asking the imagination to fill-in the backstory.

Comments

[drivingblind.livejournal.com]

I think what Greg Stolze does (in REIGN, at least) with random character creation gets it right: you're always allocating the same number of points (so there's no perception of one character being more powerful, more potent than another due to random happenstance), but how those points get allocated varies wildly.

If you haven't had a crack at the random One Roll Engine style character creation in REIGN, and you love randomness as I do, you owe it to yourself to try it out.

[rob-donoghue.livejournal.com]

I just want to highlight this point as realy being key. Randomness is awesome and well loved for it's variety, but less well loved for its _disparity_. It is really fun and interesting to take the data presented in a D&D stat roll or Marvel powers selection and weave it into a story. That challenges certain mental muscles in a neat, engaging way. However, that engagement is quickly squashed when I get toast generation and the other guy got the power cosmic. The chargen makes a fun story, but play falls down.

Now, a good GM can fix this by knowing when to call for a reroll, but too many rerolls and you suddenly start wondering about why you're not just picking something from the list, and once you're there, point creation makes a lot of sense.

Reign's random chargen is very satisfying because it generates those elements that you need to weave together, but does so in a way which makes them mechanically equivalent (at least approximately) so that you get the best of both worlds. Similarly, I've had great success with things as simple as tarot readings or randomly generated background elements, words, relationships or the like that the player has to fold into their idea. Heck, I'm working on just such a deck for my upcoming D&D game, and I'm pretty sure it will rock.

All of which is to say, I don't think the idea is as out of vogue as you suggest. It merely has been sanded and polished to reveal the really fun stuff (the engagement in creating a story out of unexpected elements) while shedding the stuff that is just less fun to play (13 int 1 hit point wizards ad such). This is not to say that it's been tapped - there aren't a huge number of games that really use this well. That said, there are supplemental materials like Story Cards (http://storycardsrpg.com/) which can fill the gap, but it's still broadly undiscovered country.

But on a purely practical level, crack open a copy of Reign, grab 11d10 and roll up a character. That's all it takes to see that the magic is still there.

[mithriltabby]

My experience is usually that I read up on a world and think of a character that would be fun to play in that world. The value of random-generation tables for me is that they give you examples of things you should think of for your character: what is their background? How big is their family? What challenges did they have to meet to get where they are? I will usually wind up picking and choosing from the tables before I expand on them, or making up something that wasn’t on the table, but it’s good to see the level of detail expected for character creation.

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

What about the Traveller world-creation system that sometimes provided seemingly contradictory conditions?

I can attest that trying to solve the contradictions drove me in interesting directions when I was writing for JTAS. That was true to the point that I deliberately restricted myself to the known-to-be-broken sector numbers generated by Digest Group back in the late 80s just because I enjoyed where I ended up.

The readers ate it up too. Some of the results are still in JTAS' top ten rated articles of all time.

[blktalon.livejournal.com]

You've got into some heavy stuff there. It part of the bored I have with some the MMO. I much enjoy my RPG. Especially when I have to matched wits with GM. He was surprised during the last game that we took the cerebral approach to solving the problem, verses fighting.

[bruceb.livejournal.com]

Ditto, which is why I'm having fun toying with options for my story props project - it's the stuff that nobody planned or sought out but that still fits overall that leads to some of the best invention.

[drivingblind.livejournal.com]

It was in fact a desire for the random element in play that ultimately moved my playgroup off of Amber Diceless and onto using Fudge for our Amber games... which then led to Fate.

[gerzel.livejournal.com]

I think one part of it is that the RPGs of the day are following the way that new players are introduced to gaming via computer games and mmos. Computerized versions have very little room for "filling in" with imagination and are obligated to provide playable and "balanced" characters in many cases.

[xomec.livejournal.com]

Perhaps so, but if that is the case, then it's a mistake, IMHO, since the opportunity to "fill in the blanks" is one of the areas where tabletop RPGs still beat-out console games and MMOs. Rather than trying to be "an MMO with an extremely slow processor" (as a friend put it), tabletop RPGs should play to their strengths, encouraging (even demanding) some player engagement and imagination rather than spoon-feeding.

[gerzel.livejournal.com]

Hey I never said it was the *right* way to do it.

[darktouch.livejournal.com]

It's interesting to see people getting back to the nostalgic aspects of their old gaming experience. There comes a point where the experience becomes so refined that you start to miss the old mess. Its a similar desire to the one that gave us the NeoRetro cartooning style (PowerPuff Girls, Kim Possible, Danny Phantom).

You're slowly convincing me of the need for an M&M lite game box set with random character generation, a 64 page 'core book', a 32 page adventure, dice (d20 obviously.. though I've been playing with a d20 to d12 conversion because my son 18 month old has foam d12), and maybe some player handouts or standees on cardstock.

[cassandra-e.livejournal.com]

Thanks for some excellent points! We really enjoy random elements in play. (Some of our most memorable gaming moments came from trying to explain those totally random events; just how does one have a catastrophic failure when taking a tricorder reading?) We also still generally roll dice for character creation. It's been a long time, though, since I thought about how to use randomness in setting and adventure design.

[joannahurley.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan of random options, particularly in character creation. It's especially helpful for those times when you have NO idea what you want to play. :) Generally, I think random tables get the creative juices flowing.

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

The disparity that comes from random character generation was very obvious in Villains and Vigilantes, but we found ways around it that enabled players to have useful combinations of powers that still encourage randomness. The best compromise was to give all PCs the same number of randomly rolled powers (not the recommended 1d+1), but give them a choice of trading in any two randomly generated powers for a hand-picked one. This left us with a group with a variety of abilities, without anyone having a totally useless PC.

Where I really miss random character generation, though, is as a GM - particularly in superhero RPGs. I once whipped up a computer program that randomly generated villains' stats and abilities ad infinitum, leaving me to pick out the most interesting ones and come up with names, origin stories, and crimes they could specialize in. Sure, some of them were pretty weird, but damn it was fun.